


Watch the wall my darling

by Dissenter



Category: Black Lagoon, Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, BAMF Sawada Nana, But mostly information, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Guns also help, Information is Power, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, Nana and Rock are cousins, Perceptive Nana, Reborn is not happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 03:57:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10891224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dissenter/pseuds/Dissenter
Summary: Nana's cousin Rokuro supposedly died in a pirate attack years ago. Except he didn't. Now Nana is in trouble and she has no-one else to call.





	Watch the wall my darling

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when you binge watch black lagoon while in the middle of ongoing khr fics. Gratuitous crossovers that make almost no sense. It was kind of satisfying to write though. There's something about Nana that just gives me the irresistible urge to add a dark and complicated backstory covered up by an innocent act.

It was at Aunt Yui’s wedding that they first met. Nana was six and her cousin Rokuro was seven, and they were both bored out of their minds. She remembered sneaking outside with him while the adults stood around with glasses of wine holding boring conversations over the children’s heads. She remembered how they’d climbed the twisted old tree to get up onto the roof, and the wild rush of adrenaline as they sat on the edge and looked down. There had been something hypnotic about it. She’d stayed sitting, drawn to the danger but too cautious to go any further, but he’d stood up right on the edge, halfway to jumping and smiled in exhilaration.

Then the adults had realised what they were doing, there had been panic, and chaos, and shouting, and once the two of them were back safe on the ground they had both been in so much trouble. That had been her first meeting with her cousin Rokuro. Years later she looked back on it and wondered if it had been a sign of things to come.

…

The last time she saw her cousin before his funeral, had been at another family gathering. Their grandmother’s 80th birthday as it happened. He’d been 23 with a new and respectable job as a businessman, she’d been 22, newly married with a baby on the way. Iemitsu hadn’t been there.

They’d talked, they weren’t especially close, lived too far away to have ever spent much time together growing up, but they’d always got on well enough, and family gatherings hadn’t gotten any more interesting since that day at aunt Yui’s wedding. They’d talked about the weather, and the buffet, and whether great aunt Ayame was going embarrass everyone by trying to do karaoke later. He’d noticed her ring and she’d told him how romantic and sweet Iemitsu was. She didn’t tell him, _he felt dangerous, I could tell he was dangerous and I couldn’t look away, I wanted it so much._ She’d asked after his work and he’d told her he was doing well, and thought he could be successful in the company. He didn’t say, _I hate it, I hate it and I feel like I’m suffocating, like I’m dying and I want to burn it all to the ground._ They didn’t talk about the day they first met, when they’d balanced on the precipice between life and death, while everyone else stood inside and made small talk. There were some things you just weren’t supposed to talk about after all.

…

His funeral had been sombre, respectable, a fitting tribute for a dutiful member of society. There was nothing about the boy on the rooftop there. She’d been 23, with a baby Tsuna in her arms, and Iemitsu was out of the country again. She sat quietly and didn’t say a word, but she hoped, deep down where no-one could see, that he’d died with that same look of fierce excitement that he’d worn that day they’d first met.

…

She was 27 the day her cousin came back from the dead. It had been a funeral, ironically enough, her uncle his father’s. He’d been hit by a car, died a week later in the hospital, nothing to be done. She’d been polite and respectful, but she hadn’t really known her uncle all that well, and so while his closer relatives were distracted by grief, she’d _noticed,_ when a man came in quietly and sat at the back, stuck to the shadows as though he was trying to hide. She’d followed, when he tried to slip away after.

She’d caught him a few streets away, and it had been five years but she recognised her cousin. Tanned, and weather-beaten, with scars on his hands, and the kind of wear and tear a desk job could never cause on his suit. She’d faced him silently for a moment, before speaking.

“We thought you were dead.” She said, and carefully kept any judgement out of her tone because he looked about ready to bolt. “Where have you been?” She asked, and it took him a few moments to think of an answer. She could see him consider lying, then consider the truth. She wondered if he was remembering that day on the roof too. Maybe he was, because in the end he settled on the truth, or a part of it. Enough of it to make any ordinary respectable person run screaming.

“In the shadows of this world” he said, and he always had been a little dramatic, but then she’d always liked that about him, so she let it slide. In the end, with the high drama stripped out it boiled down to this. He couldn’t stand the suffocating ordinariness of his life any longer, the everyday that was so bland and petty and pointless it could barely be called living. He couldn’t stand it so he ran away to become a pirate, and it might have been melodramatic but she could see that look in his eyes, the one he’d worn when they stood at the top of that building and _knew_ how fragile and beautiful life was, and she knew he was happier than he’d ever been as a businessman.

The both of them loved danger just a little too much.

He asked her to let him stay dead, to not tell their family where he was. She thought that maybe she should have felt worse about agreeing. But in the end their family had done their mourning, had held his funeral and moved on. It would do no-one any good to mess with his memory, not when he was living so close to the edge every moment might be his last, not when he chose to leave everything to live surrounded by blood and death. They wouldn’t understand, they wouldn’t understand any of it, and it would rip open all the healed over wounds that his death had left, to tell them.

So she held her silence and let him leave, in exchange for a phone number. She wouldn’t tell their family that he lived, but she didn’t want to lose him again.

…

Rock was 29 the day his cousin Nana called him for help. Called him, frightened and alone, and not sure what to do. Benny had answered the phone, and Rock could see his surprise from across the room.

“Hey Rock. It’s for you. Some woman, says she’s your cousin.” He’d ignored the curious looks and picked up the receiver.

“Nana, is that you?” It was.

“Rokuro.” She said, and there was an edge to her tone he didn’t like. “I think. I think I might be in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I don’t know.” She admitted. “But whatever it is, it’s about my husband. I need you to find out. Please. What is my husband involved in.”

By the time he’d put down the phone there were three sets of eyes glaring a hole in him, demanding an explanation.

“What the hell was that Rock?” Revy asked, and of course it was Revy who asked, she never did see any point in patience.

“That was my cousin Nana.” He replied calmly. “She thinks her husband might be a criminal. She wants me to find out.”

“I thought your family thought you were dead?” Benny noted casually.

“They do. Mostly. Nana caught me at my father’s funeral and agreed to keep it quiet. That’s why she has this number.”

“Whatever. We’re not detectives. Tell your cousin to hire a PI if she wants to find out what her husband’s doing behind her back, he’s probably just having an affair.” Revy again. Sympathy was not a strong point.

“I told her I’d see what I could do. What she’s told me, it sounds worrying.”

“What exactly did she tell you?” Dutch spoke up.

“She told me that her husband claimed to be a construction worker but week ago he came back from overseas with his boss, who was most definitely not a construction worker. She told me that after they were gone she looked into her husband’s things and found a gun and six fake ID’s stashed where he thought she wouldn’t look. She told me that she knew he was dangerous the first time she saw him and she married him anyway, but that her son Tsuna is five years old and didn’t ask for any of this.”

“I can try looking him up.” Benny offered. “What’s the husband’s name?”

“Sawada. Iemitsu Sawada.”

…

He called Nana back two days later. He got straight to the point.

“Do you really want to know?” He asked. “Because once you know there’s no going back.”

“I need to know.” She answered. “I need to know, because if whatever my husband is involved in comes back to bite me, or Tsuna, I need to know what’s coming.” She wasn’t wrong.

“Sawada Iemitsu is the head of the CEDEF, the outside advisory body for the Vongola. The Vongola is the biggest mafia family in Italy. Your husband is in the mafia, and he’s not low ranked.”

“I see.” She said softly. She might not have known the details, but she’d known what to expect. He waited a moment before asking.

“What are you going to do now?” And it was a serious question. Would she try and confront her husband, would she try and run, both options carried risks, depending on how her husband reacted.

“Now, I’m going to pretend I know nothing.” That was an answer he hadn’t expected. She must have guess that because she continued. “I knew he was dangerous when I married him. I might not have known why, but I did. That’s why I wanted him, and my feelings haven’t changed. I don’t want to leave him. And I don’t particularly want to confront him either. If he knows that I know, that will bring up questions about _how_ I know. And it’s not like I would gain any new information from a confrontation.”

“Why did you want to know so badly if you weren’t going to do anything.” He was curious.

“Because I didn’t want to be caught unawares. I don’t mind danger, but for Tsuna’s sake I need to know where it’s coming from.” Rock found himself forcibly reminded of the first time he met his cousin. Of her excitement when they stood together on the roof of a three story building, and he remembered. In some ways they were too much alike.

“If you need help, I’ll come for you.” He promised. Reckless, but in that moment there was no other choice he could have made. Not for the only family who’d ever really understood him.

…

Tsuna was seven when he first met cousin Rock. He was seven and terrified, and he hadn’t really understood what was going on. All he knew was that one moment it had been an ordinary day, and then there had been shouting, and crashing, and the earth shattering crack of what he would later learn were gunshots. And then his mother had come into his room and told him to pack quickly before going to the phone and having a conversation too quiet for him to hear anything but the urgent tone.

There had been blood on the floor of the hallway when they came downstairs, so much blood and two people lying far too still. As still as the cat he’d found in an alleyway once after a group of kids had beaten it to death. Kaasan had rushed him past the bodies without a word, and Tsuna was too afraid to scream, and there was something hard and metallic and unfamiliar tucked under her coat.

They’d booked an aeroplane ticket, and then they’d got changed in an alley, and Kaasan had made him wear a dress and a wig, and then they’d gone to the train station and brought a different set of tickets. He’d passed out on the train, exhausted by the shocks of the day.

They met cousin Rock at the harbour. He’d been worried but kind, and Kaasan had been so relieved to see him she was almost shaking. There was a girl there too, her name was Revy, and she had guns as well. Once they were on the boat she’d offered to show him how to use them, but the big man called Dutch had told her no, not while they were on the boat. Tsuna wasn’t sure if he should be relieved. He knew the guns were dangerous, he knew what his Kaasan had done with one, but cousin Rock had sat down with him and explained very carefully that she’d had to do it to keep Tsuna and herself from getting hurt. He hadn’t liked the still dead people in the hallway, but he liked the idea of his Kaasan being that still even less. If it was to protect Kaasan he would be willing to learn to use a gun.

In the end he didn’t learn how to use a gun, but he did learn a lot of other things. They’d stayed with cousin Rock in Roanapur for a while and Dutch had said that if it looked like they were hiding it would only draw attention, so they should act like they belonged, and Benny had brought them some clothes, and they’d found an apartment, and they had tried to stay out of trouble.

Tsuna had learned lots of things by the time it was time to go home, he had learned how to take messages, and how to pick pockets, and how not to annoy adults with guns, and how to _run_ quick and clever, down the paths adults couldn’t follow on, when he was in trouble. Cousin Rock and his friends were never too far away, but they couldn’t keep him too close either, because if they did it might make Tsuna look like an important target. That was something else Tsuna learned in Roanapur, that sometimes the best way to keep something important safe was to pretend it wasn’t important at all. The most important thing Tsuna learned in Roanapur though, was to trust that strange _knowing,_ that told him when people were dangerous, and when they were safe, that warned him when something bad was coming. If it hadn’t been for that knowing he might have ended up in bad trouble.

…

When they finally went home to Namimori the whole town looked different. The alleys that had once been frightening, now looked like escape routes, the bullies that had once terrorised him looked like helpless children. Hibari-senpai who had once seemed terrifying, was now an almost reassuringly familiar presence, bloodthirsty but not threatening, not as long as you followed the rules.

It wasn’t long before he had a new nickname either. Never let it be said that children aren’t perceptive, it didn’t take long for Dame Tsuna to become Delinquent Tsuna, for his clothes, and his habit of cutting class, and the attitude of amused condescension when confronted by his former bullies. He couldn’t bring himself to care, not when he’d seen what real danger looked like.

…

Nana was 35 and Tsuna was 12 when Iemitsu’s sins came back to haunt them again. She’d hoped it was dealt with after the incident with the assassins that had left her and Tsuna hiding out in Roanapur for three months while the Hibaris dealt with the immediate problem, and her husband’s organisation plugged the leak that had given the assassins their location. Her husband had thought they were on a cruise. No sense in giving their actual location to the same people that had leaked their existence in the first place after all.

It had been a good thing that first time that Nana had prepared for something happening, had taken Iemitsu’s gun out to the woods and learned to _use_ it, and figured out how to leave town unseen. She’d had the theory all worked out at least, and if the theory had been a pale mockery of how it felt to pull the trigger and leave two men dead on the floor well, there was little to be done about it. (If she broke down in tears in her cousin’s arms later, well he wouldn’t tell a soul).

She’d killed two men, and then she’d run and taken shelter in the most notorious criminal city on earth, and three months later when her cousin’s contacts had given the all clear, and the Hibaris had said the intruders had all been disposed of, she’d hoped that might be an end of it. She might be drawn to danger on her own account but she _never_ wanted to see Tsuna hurt.

But of course it wasn’t an end of it, and when Tsuna was 12 Iemitsu dragged them back into his troubles. Intentionally this time, and Rokuro hadn’t told her Tsuna was in line to become a mafia boss. Then again he probably had no way of knowing. From the look of it, it wasn’t publicly available knowledge. She had called her cousin, he deserved to know, after everything he’d done for them, but after three months in Roanapur she was under no illusions that he could help. She knew the limits to his influence and this was beyond him. Still he might be able to get her information at the least and knowledge was power. So she called her cousin, and asked about babies who weren’t babies, and a hitman named Reborn, and the Vongola family itself, and she listened very carefully to what he told her.

…

Tsuna was 12 years old and Reborn was harbouring dark suspicions that Iemitsu had missed something important in his surveillance of his wife and son. Tsuna was too wary, too hardened around the edges, in a way that didn’t fit the soft civilian tone of the town. Reborn had known kids with eyes like that, kids that knew every back alleyway, and didn’t flinch at gunshots, he’d been one of them once, a long time ago. And he knew one thing for sure, they didn’t live in nice suburban towns like Namimori. He’d watched as Tsuna saw him, instantly pegged him as a threat in a way that strongly suggested his hyper intuition was already active, and then walked up to him relaxed but cautious, curious about what he wanted but ready to run if he didn’t like it. It was the sort of behaviour Reborn would expect from slum kids, from kids who lived with crime and danger as an everyday part of life. Not the sweet clumsy civilian Iemitsu claimed his son to be.

And Tsuna wasn’t the worst of it. Sawada Nana was meant to be oblivious. If that woman was oblivious he’d eat his hat. She _knew_ something, probably a lot more than she should, and she kept giving him these _looks,_ the “I know more about you than you know about me” looks. It reminded him of Viper, he didn’t like it. And there was something in her eyes too, easy to miss, but impossible to disguise. The eyes of someone who had killed. Reborn was feeling the urge to _strangle_ Iemitsu.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not planning to continue this one. I honestly have no idea where i'd take it and I have far too many other fics on the go at the moment. I wrote it mostly to break through the writers block on More things in heaven and earth.


End file.
